Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to help project management (PM) game designers and educators in simulating complexity in PM games and in assessing the effect of simulated project complexity levels on students' learning experience. To achieve this aim, the authors attempt to design and evaluate two computer-based project crashing games (PCGs)…

Social work educators are compelled to use reliable and valid methods to assess student learning outcomes. This study adapted a clinical simulation by integrating traditional role-play of case scenarios and elements of the Objective Structured Clinical Examination, which is often used to assess students' practice skills. Master of Social Work…

This study investigates the relationship between measures of user activity within a Learning Management System (LMS) and student performance during a series of Virtual Field Experience (VFE) online learning modules. Implemented in a graduate-level course on teaching methods for learners with mild/moderate disabilities, each VFE activity was…

At the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague (CULS Prague) a wide range of marketing courses are taught, covering many aspects of marketing theory. The curriculum of the majority of marketing courses consists of case studies and project work in teams. The students in their MSc. studies have five…

This chapter describes a small-scale pilot study in which participants in the experimental group learned how to write Japanese kanji characters within an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) graffiti simulator (the Kingspray Graffiti Simulator on the Oculus Rift VR system). In comparing the experimental group to the non-VR control group in the context…

This paper presents several methods for motivating students taking a power system protection (PSP) course. The paper reviews the laboratory activities developed for the PSP course at Curtin University, Australia; these methods are applicable and can be used for PSP course instruction at any institution. These activities were developed to improve…

Research has shown that the use of communication media in distance education can reduce feelings of distance and isolation from peers and tutors and provide opportunities for collaborative learning (Bates, 2005). The use of virtual worlds (VW) in education has increased in recent years, with Second Life (SL) being the most commonly used VW in…

In higher education, more and more students take part in online courses that require them to engage in virtual work groups. Research has shown that online learners are likely to experience information overload and considerable challenges associated with online learning environments. These challenges are exacerbated when learners have to work as…

Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem-solving. A more recent…

Drawing from research on situated cognition and the development of expertise and simulations in professional education, we designed two simulation tasks that provided novice teachers with repeated opportunities to deliberately practice managing a classroom under no-fault conditions. The simulations immersed novices in two perennial classroom…

Recent neuroimaging evidence has suggested that expert dancers have stronger activation than novices in areas of parietal cortex while watching dance. The role of parietal cortex in the processing of spatial information could suggest that expert dancers are more attuned than novice dancers to spatial cues while watching dance. Instead of focusing…

The use of checklists is recommended for the assessment of competency in central venous catheterization (CVC) insertion. To explore the use of a global rating scale in the assessment of CVC skills, this study seeks to compare its use with two checklists, within the context of a formative examination using simulation. Video-recorded performances of…

In this paper, we describe the development and evaluation of a microworld-based learning environment for neuroscience. Our system, BrainExplorer, allows students to discover the way neural pathways work by interacting with a tangible user interface. By severing and reconfiguring connections, users can observe how the visual field is impaired and,…

The "body inversion effect" refers to superior recognition of upright than inverted images of the human body and indicates typical configural processing. Previous research by Reed et al. using static images of the human body shows that people with autism fail to demonstrate this effect. Using a novel task in which adults, adolescents…

This research explores the extent to which virtual worlds can serve as online collaborative learning environments for students by increasing social presence and engagement. 3D environments enable learning, which simulates face-to-face encounters while retaining the advantages of online learning. Students in Education departments created avatars…